Adjusting to natural disasters

Abstract

People adjust to the risks presented by natural disasters in a number of ways; they can move out of harms way, they can self protect, or they can insure. This paper uses Hurricane Andrew, the largest U.S. natural disaster prior to Katrina, to evaluate how people and housing markets respond to a large disaster. Our analysis combines a unique ex post database on the storm’s damage along with information from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses in Dade County, Florida where the storm hit. The results suggest that the economic capacity of households to adjust explains most of the differences in demographic groups’ patterns of adjustment to the hurricane damage. Low income households respond primarily by moving into low-rent housing in areas that experienced heavy damage. Middle income households move away to avoid risk, and the wealthy, for whom insurance and self-protection are most affordable, appear to remain. This pattern of adjustment with respect to income is roughly mean neutral, so an analysis based on measures of central tendency such as median income would miss these important adjustments. Copyright Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2006Natural hazards, Economic adjustment, Hurricanes,

Socio-economic consequences of post-disaster reconstruction in hazard-exposed areas

“…An important caveat, also highlighted elsewhere 24 , is that not all lower-income households living in hazard-exposed areas are necessarily 'trapped' there; some households do want to live in these areas, for diverse reasons. Although many economic studies have shown price discounts for properties in hazard-exposed areas [25][26][27][28][29][30][31] , we show that this is linked to people's stated motivations and to movement toward less-exposed areas by higher-income households. Finally, although many studies have observed that hazard-exposed areas tend to be occupied by lower-income households [32][33][34] , we show the origination of this pattern as a result of new knowledge of the risk and an abundant supply of aid housing provided in hazard-exposed areas.…”

“…whereas lower-income households moved into more exposed areas because of reduced property prices 31 . Especially in developing countries, locations that are exposed to frequent disasters tend to be inhabited by lower-income households 32,33 (for an exception to this, see Supplementary Note 1).…”

The impact of natural disasters on energy consumption: An analysis of renewable and nonrenewable energy demand in the residential and industrial sectors

“…Summary of extracted disasters regression estimates is presented in Tables 1 and 2 for the contemporaneous and the lagged disasters, respectively. 4 The results for different country groups are displayed in columns.…”

Temperatures and cyclones strongly associated with economic production in the Caribbean and Central America

“…When individuals adapt to changes in climatological conditions, the response may differ (32,33). Agriculture and tourism, industries where geographic location plays a central role in production, suffer most from tropical cyclones.…”